FireSprite

I don't think so - although I wouldn't ever dismiss anything without deeper introspection. I can't see this relationship's future & my goal right now is to be able to communicate our way through whatever those future events hold - we have to try to do better for DD if nothing else. Our living arrangement is financially smart, but temporary by every standard. Again - as long as he's agreeable/fixing up our physical assets, I'm not spending more than I have to, etc. In therapy, I refused to commit to working toward anything EXCEPT better communication for now. That's as far as I can see. It could all blow up again tomorrow, I have no control.

Part of the "Saturday Night Problem" is that I HAVE been moving on..... slowly, but still moving on..... and he's keenly aware of that fact. It's not THAT I'm going out, it's who I'll be seeing while I'm there. (even while I'm NOT there to see him specifically, it's unavoidable) I've been upfront with my husband about this other guy pursuing me heavily over this last year & he's chosen to ride in the backseat to protect his own interests rather than joining me in this marriage & giving me anything worth fighting for. And it's a sticky, sticky situation - they travel in the same professional/social circles & my admirer has been not-so-subtle about his intentions.

Now - before things get twisted - I am in NO WAY suggesting that the solution to my marriage problem is to jump headfirst into what would surely be another dysfunctional relationship. If I was in that frame of mind, I'd have taken that leap many, many months ago because opportunities have been abundant - trust me. We've reached a sort of holding pattern over the last few months & it's understood that the ball is firmly in my court but I'm not jumping into anything. I'd be lying if I said it hurt my ego to be chased & chased & chased & chased for solid YEAR.

My life has turned into a Shawn Mendes song.... so go ahead, bring on the firing squad.

hopeful4

Nope, no firing squad from me. I mean, what does he expect? To expect you to stay in a stagnant place while he refuses to grow and participate is not realistic.

I support you no matter what friend!!!!!

LifeRecovery

I am so glad that you are going.

It took me a bit to touch into the anger that was there for me about my relationship, but I really needed to.

At the time it felt like it took forever to let it all out, but I needed it to close the wound up and heal at a deeper level. Having a therapist for that for me was really needed.

Good job taking care of you.

PS part of what I was angry about was the need to work on one more piece from this relationship!

FireSprite

Yep, yep, yep! This is most definitely a big component in my anger.

I just can't seem to hold ONTO it for very long & that's frustrating too.... being in-between with my own anger, in & out of different pieces of My Angry.

This week is flying by - the days move very quickly from work to DD's events to resetting for the next day to get up & go at it all over again. We won't get a break until Saturday evening & have been going at it solidly for a week now with irons in every fire. Work is crushingly busy but I have had to work shorter days in order to make time for all of DD's events. She has a lot going on with her current classes in terms of obligations & due dates, plus all of these high school tours & conversations with her advisor, teachers, program admins & other parents. Trying to conceive of what a 13-yr old's, 5-yr plan looks like is beyond my norm - we are working hard to flesh out how to even verbalize such a thing at this stage.

One thing I did during our therapy appt was ask my husband to take a giant step back to observe this week - not physically, but emotionally & mentally. I asked him to sit back & watch this child as she interacts with others & see who she is, through their eyes.

Think - where were YOU when she was becoming this person? How did you contribute to this amazing person who is crushing life already at 13? Listen to her speak - do you see how that little girl has outgrown her southern drawl through all of her theater & chorus work? Do you hear the confidence of Self, her maturity in her Big 50 cent words? Do you recognize that she's morphed from a little smurf of a toddler who had to destroy everything to get to the center to see how it works/what it's made of is the same, tall, developing teen girl standing here that has discovered 50 different ways to create goo?.... she's using different tools but still has the science brain at work in there....... do you see how she's headed for a career in that area? I told him we both know he can't take ownership of any of it, that being a passive witness to her experience isn't the same as helping her develop as a human being. I told him regardless of everything else he needs to figure out what kind of father he wants to be & ask himself if he's living up to that model. To his credit, he's shown up, on time for every event. That's progress for him even while it's nothing I feel the need to pat his back about..... it's only what he should have been doing all this time anyway there are no special awards for that in my current perspective.

And, guys, she's KILLING it. Once her initial nerves settled, she's been engaged, asking great questions, showing amazing poise & grace, maturity, balance, love. There is no doubt that this scholarship opportunity will change her life for the better & I could not be more grateful for them or proud of her for working so hard to earn it.

FireSprite

It's also worth mentioning that I spent a good part of last weekend sitting with the discomfort of grieving my marriage.... I had that enormous AHA moment of realizing that there is never any chance of us going back to "who we were" or "where we were" no matter how much anyone may desire that on any side of this.

Going forward we HAVE to become something new, it's unavoidable because we have been doing that all this time anyway when you think about it. It's impossible to unfeel, unsee & unknow too much. The BEST we could work toward is holding onto the parts that were real & happy without pretending the bad things away.... just removing them from focus somehow.

.... work in progress there....

MindfulMan

Whatever the state of your relationship, and no matter how much he's failed it, after you've exhausted your anger and resentment (and it sounds like there is a lot of it, probably all valid!), it may really help your personal growth if you acknowledge and explore your part in this relationship, completely independently of what he has done. It's unusual to have no part in issues with adult relationships, it may be as simple as staying long after you should have left, and that a continued relationship with this much animosity may not have been the best thing for either you or your daughter. There may be more as well.

I'm hardly suggesting that this relationship could or should be saved. Maybe yes, maybe no. This experience is giving you an opportunity to learn good things about yourself. You have more of a chance of putting this relationship behind you if you work through some of these feelings, and most importantly not use the same tools and behaviors in any other relationships in your life.

Yes, I'm projecting my own experience here. I'm not formally doing a Fourth Step with a sponsor, but my therapist strongly believes in this process. It isn't easy. We are approaching the process with a specific end goal, to identify a thread in my life leading up to all of my resentful relationships, getting angry and doing a character assassination (this is the easy part), honestly going through my part in the failed relationship, and finding new strategies to find new and more effective ways of relating.

I hope this process is going well and you have the opportunity to use it for yourself, not your partner or your daughter. We can't force others to change to suit our needs, we can only change ourselves.

FireSprite

Oh gosh, that's all I HAVE done for years, lol. The vast majority of recovery work I've done is ALL about me & very little to do with him at all.

https://www.soberrecovery.com/forums...al-update.html (My long, annual update)

I do agree with your points & after last night's session my therapist agrees with me that a big part of our problem is that I have already done so much personal recovery work........ while he has regressed during that same time.

According to her, I have a good grasp of my codependency, utilize every available resource at my disposal, have created financial independence to the best of my ability, have addressed my ACoA issues, worked on healing my Inner Child, understand & enact boundary setting with toxic people in every area of my life, use *I* statements primarily (even in what she observed in our joint session last week) have good self-awareness & accountability. I've developed strong roots spiritually, gotten healthy physically & emotionally in every possible way - & I'm still open to whatever's next. She left it on the note of telling me that she wasn't exactly sure HOW to help me moving forward except to continue doing all that I'm doing, until we can get a better idea of where he stands in relation to all of this on his side of the street after his appt next week.

I pushed for joint sessions to stay in regular rotation despite the need for individual therapy (which will continue regardless) just so that we can have some help in spotting when our communication is breaking down during conversation. We may have him schedule 2 individual sessions to my 1, for instance... he has FAR more work to do & is less willing to do it independently.

I told her I still can only agree to committing as far as developing better communication between us for DD's sake if nothing else & that I ~more than anyone~ realize he has A LOT of personal work to do to get to that point on his side. I told her that right now, we can't even negotiate our way through a divorce if that's how/where we end up & after ALL this, I'd rather not shoot myself in the foot by rushing things. None of this is really impacting MY day-to-day life, not really, which sounds insane to my own ears, trust me. But again - we've been living separate lives for a long time now.

The weekend ended up getting all changed around due to circumstances outside of us but ended up pretty decent all around anyway. The best part for me personally is that I've changed up my routine the last couple of weeks & have spent a lot of time on our property clearing & burning away debris & piles of wood that have been stacking up for the duration of our marital problems... the irony of which is not lost on me at all. I've not made it even halfway around my fence line & have piles stacked in addition to what I've been burning the whole time...... purge, baby, purge.

My thoughts tumble the entire time & I wander the property from this area to that, stoke & feed the fire and then go back to policing the fence line, making sure to remove anything that crosses that boundary - either owning it as damage on my side or realizing the majority of that damage rests on the other side & pushing it back over instead. I am scarring the earth, creating new walkways as I remove, prune, drag dead trees & limbs across the ground.

I re-read Glennon Doyle Melton's "Love Warrior" last week because I am lucky enough to be going to see her soon & wanted to revisit her last book. A couple of her points really struck home for me as I thought back over it during my purging process:

That Crisis means "to sift" - to shake out the excesses & leave what's important.... that's what I feel like I'm doing, sifting & sorting my thoughts as well as stuff in my physical space.

That the word disaster has it's roots in a lack of light - dis, meaning lack & aster derivative of astro for stars = lack of light. I only face disaster if I choose to see everything happening as a lack of light instead of seeking OUT the lightness. I do not ever have to choose to embrace darkness.

That the original Hebrew word for woman, Ezer, has 2 roots - strong & benevolent, which translates best as: Warrior. As I sweat it out while purging my soul & land & brain I can really connect with that definition of Self.

biminiblue

Beautiful insights, great post, FS. (post #27)

Aeryn

I'm not sure if this relates exactly to your situation but your thread made me think of it just in case it was useful....what I came to realize was once I found recovery I realized I was an entirely different person than I had been "being" during my entire marriage to my XRAH....and I do mean entirely different: different interests, different views, different values, different thoughts, different ways of seeing and living life.....it was like I had been living as a shell of myself to please others and didn't even know who I was.

Once I became different I realized I had very little if anything in common with XRAH. I mean I didn't even like the same TV shows or movies! We used to watch together....I now realize they were things he liked not me. I also LIKE expressing emotions even if they are loud and not so nice for a moment...I do not enjoy holding things in or brushing under the rug. XRAH (I'll say partial recovery partial sober - he hasn't had a drink in over two years but he's still emotionally immature...as in masks almost all emotions)....well what I realized about him during his recovery is well he doesn't want to be emotional or close with people and he's always been a salesman, smiling making jokes instead of dealing with things. And guess what I didn't LIKE or WANT that in my partner no matter how recovered or not he was....he and his family remind me of car salesmen, the laughing and joking but never having real raw feelings. I was in a volatile relationship after I left XRAH (it didn't work out due to all the emotional outbursts we had with each other) but I realized I PREFERRED that to XRAH....even when that guy and I weren't getting along at least we TALKED (or yelled LOLOLOL) about it and at least he would GET EMOTIONAL (sad, frustrated, extremely happy whatever). It was so much better having him present (even though we weren't meant to be - too volatile) than having XRAH and his facade.

Bottom line XRAH and I get along as friends but we are two completely different people with different tests, values, and attitudes toward life...we were a horrible match for romantic partners.


Anyway I'm not sure if this at all applies but I thought I'd share just in case because your posts made me think of it.

hearthealth

I think my own growth has identified that he will never change. The current situation is not enough of a wake up call to him and maybe nothing will ever be. Can I lay on my death bed still wondering, "I wish A would do things differently". Not worth my time.

FireSprite

I think that's a big part of what we/I need to determine too Aeryn. I can see a little of both so far - in some ways we're very, very different & in other ways we still share a lot of the same interests & values. We'll see if/how that changes once he's done some real work getting honest with himself about who he is as a person.... It sounds (from what he's shared) like he's been lying to himself about everything - right down to what brings him happiness & why.

For us specifically, there's also a missing piece where I've done more compromising by trying new things outside of my comfort zone than he has & that's something that I've identified as a Big Deal. I can handle someone not liking something they've tried, but his history is to reject everything without examination as a knee-jerk reaction to stay in his comfortable rut. We actually just talked about this very thing last night, so the synchronicity of it being revived in this thread is validating for me.


That's the question on the table for him in his therapy session next week - she already told me she wants to be clear that he's there because he has a true desire to change vs. a desire to not get divorced. He really doesn't know himself any longer at all - from our talks so far he has a lot of painful self-examination to go through & deal with his FOO stuff that he's only really picked at & covered back over for decades. I have to decide if I want to stick around to see how all that's going to turn out to see if we CAN salvage a relationship.

Right now, we're working on communicating & being friends again.

aliciagr

Im really happy to hear you are seeing a therapist, and I think its great to do joint sessions with your spouse. Ive been on this forum off and on for a while now and I didnt even know you were married. I do know youve shared a lot about a broad range of resources that have helped you over the years. I knew you were focused on codependency but I didnt know about the acoa.

Reading your posts just on this thread it sounds like there is a big chasm in the relationship with your husband. I respect that you are doing this in part with the goal to co parent your child.

Not sure if you recall but I did individual therapy and also did couples therapy with my husband. The two went hand in hand very well.

There is a feeling I have in general based on all of the exploration Ive done while going through this process with my husband. I want to share this thought but want to make it clear its not based on your situation/recovery experience.

I often feel like family members are taught to focus on self, work on self. And that is great to a point, but sometimes that pendulum can swing too far and a wall goes up between a husband and wife. Not talking, not sharing, not listening, not making much effort to grown and learn together.

Individual therapy was great for me because I could work on my own feelings, my perceived strengths and weaknesses. But couples therapy added a whole new level because it helped me understand my husband better, to tear the wall between us down and know I was still safe. I could give and receive, and I didnt always have to be right and he wasnt always the one who was messed up. I feel couples therapy requires an open mind and a bit of humility on each side.

Its great to care for self but the journey isnt complete for me until I can take that new found wisdom and use it to make my life , my marriage, my family - stronger, happier, and healthier.

And no this doesnt mean anyone needs to stay in a marriage that is not fulfilling. A goal of respectfully co parenting is awesome all on its own.

Bekindalways

^^^^^ Oh my gosh, this rings so true for me.

My FOO has always been aggressively positive. They also were really outgoing, active and outdoor oriented. With 4 kids there wasn't much room for individuality so I learned to conform. I probably had some predilection for people pleasing too.

I took all of this upbringing and became the perfect codependent for my qualifier - ugh. I realized a few years into the relationship that I didn't even know what I liked to do. I had been angry at him for always doing what he liked to do but realized that I didn't even know myself. It has been lots of years of hard work to figure it out. I still wish I liked all the active outdoor stuff but I really prefer reading and knitting.

Don't mean to highjack your thread here Firesprite. You sound like you are doing well at taking that next right step in figuring this out.